Ask for a heart that never stops wanting to know and love God, even when there seems to be no time for either.

Quiet Timeless

BY BARBARA RAINEY

May the God of peace . . . equip you with everything good for doing his will. HEBREWS 13:20-21, NIV

As our children were born and my responsibilities as a mom increased, my spiritual disciplines and devotional life became a phenomenal source of failure for me.

As a single and then as a young married woman, I had been so faithful in experiencing daily, set-aside time with God. I relished long seasons of prayer and Bible study, worshiping and basking in His presence. But children brought so many new and unpredictable interruptions into my life, and my pattern for meeting with God became impossible to plan for. I would get into a routine only to have it fall apart within a few weeks. I struggled with this issue for years.

Finally I decided to quit trying!

Understand that this was not a decision to quit growing but simply to stop expecting myself to fit the mental picture I had of what a spiritual Christian was supposed to look like. I still prayed every day—but not in the same way for a certain amount of time. I still worshiped and feasted on the Word—but not on a set routine schedule. It wasn’t long before my sense of oppression simply fell away. I learned that being busy as a mother didn’t have to rob me of being intimate with God. It just required me to look at things in a new way, allowing my time with Him to wrap around the life He had sovereignly designed for me.

Everyone goes through seasons of added responsibility. Some are harder and longer than others, but each of them comes with new opportunities for growing in grace and drawing closer to the Lord . . . as long as our so-called “right way to do things” is replaced by a relationship with God that’s less rigid and unrealistic.

DISCUSS
Talk about how you could help one another in making God be a bigger part of your busy day.